The Two Who Lived
by HarryPotterRox365
Summary: Ok so There Isn't Really a summary But it is H/Hr! Please R&R!
1. What Had Happened

Ok so before moi begins i just need to say That This is probably my **FIRST **story _WITH CHAPTERS_

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**The Two Who Lived**

One year ago today. Three hundred and sixty-five complete days since the final fall of Lord Voldemort. And of those whose lives helped bring that end, at the cost of their own.

The small—and now squid-free—lake on the now-quiet grounds of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry was a barely rippling sheet of silver under the pale summer moonlight, the wisps of fog above it contributing to the image in eighteen-year-old Harry Potter's mind of that of an extremely large Pensieve—much like the one that once stood in Professor Dumbledore's office—and maybe it was; his mind certainly had enough going through his mind for such a thing to be possible.

(It would have been nice if it could have been that simple—to simply remove whatever thought from your brain that you wished, no matter how horrible, to set it aside indefinitely...)

It looked so much like one that Harry suppressed the almost-mad urge he had to lean forward and touch it, for fear it _would_ actually pull him into the tides of his memory... what had happened here a year ago was still clear enough in his mind that no Pensieve was necessary... standing here, he still felt the familiar tuggings of sadness on his mind, the side effect of the far more acute memories.

If it hadn't been for the fact that he'd been in the lake a handful of times (most notably the TriWizard tournament during his fourth year, but THAT wasn't something he particularly wanted to reminisce on), he might have sworn the lake actually _was_a Pensieve. After all, far stranger things had happened at Hogwarts... many of them seemed to do so of their own accord when Harry himself had been around.

He leaned forth no closer, but did focus his gaze on the green-eyed reflection that stared back at him. A tall, somewhat gangly young and bespectacled man of eighteen stared back, the distorting effect of the light ripples on the pond's surface for just a moment giving the impression that a far younger Harry Potter, one still in his first years of school at Hogwarts, was looking back instead.

It was the scar on his forehead (as well as the obvious that he _knew_ how old he was) that dissipated the illusion of the past—or rather, the remnants of the scar. All his young life, the scar had been part of him, a legacy of Lord Voldemort's reign of darkness, a legacy that was most prominent for Harry in the murder of his parents as an infant, in which he'd received the mark from Voldemort... which had been far less than he'd wanted to give Harry that night. Every time, when Voldemort (in one form or another) would show strong signs of a new rise to power, or came near, that scar would sear like the shock from an oversized one of Hagrid's Blast-Ended Skrewts. It had also, unlike most scars, never showed any signs of fading, either.

That was, until a year ago.

It was with a vague sadness that he'd, a few months ago, first truly noted the scar's fading presence—despite its origins, it _had_ been a part of him for as long as he could remember, something that had become seemingly forever intertwined with him: within a few months, it would be gone forever. It was what always reminded him of the necessity to remove Voldemort forever—the scar itself was an unfinished attempt, to kill Harry, and every time that scar burned, he knew there was yet his own unfinished business which needed tending.

But that wasn't the main source of the sadness: with Voldemort's destruction, here on this very campus, a year ago, a part of Harry had been taken away. Not the scar, but something far more terrible... the result was that while one scar was at last fading away to nothing, no longer needed—a new one had formed, terrible enough he'd gladly have kept the first in its place.

Was it him, or for a moment—had he seen a familiar pale freckled face there, a person standing beside him...

Maybe this lake wasn't a large Pensieve, but a large Mirror of Erised.

No. It was an illusion. And Ron hadn't been—this wasn't where it had—

He couldn't finish the thought, and only his face looked back at him from the water.

His eyes were so focused on the scar that he at first didn't notice the sudden intrusion of a new presence in the reflection. A figure in Muggle clothing (a thin sweater and baggy jeans), which raised up a hand and aimed it at his back, as if clutching a wand...

"_Petrificus Totalus_."

Harry jumped around to face the subtly grinning face of a woman his age with (only somewhat controlled) brown hair. Never minding the fact that if her spell _had_ actually worked, as would certainly have been the case had she been really trying, he shouldn't have been able to jump at all.

"Not funny."

"If I was someone else, you'd _wouldn't_ be able to respond, you know." Hermione Granger slid the wand into a pocket and folded her arms across her chest, and she looked very much the forever-studying (when she hadn't been hanging around with Harry and Ron, of course) bookish girl who had been one of Harry's two closest friends at Hogwarts—only now minus the books, of course, and the slightly oversized front teeth. She'd lost those their fourth year here, indirectly thanks to a hallway confrontation (yet another) between Harry and Draco Malfoy, in which she'd been caught in the poorly-aimed crossfire.

Perhaps seeing the look on Harry's face, Hermione's lips tightened—but she said nothing. Harry looked away from her, his eyes turning back to the lake. Her eyes followed his gaze to the shimmering water, then, with only some degree of hesitation, she sat on the grass next to him. Others might have left him alone at this point, but if there was one thing Hermione 

Granger didn't do (aside from fail _any_ classwork or exams) it was abandon a friend she perceived in need. She was just as stubborn as Harry was when it came to leaving friends behind.

Maybe that was why they were both here, he decided.

"I saw you in the Britain semifinals last month," Hermione said after a moment, referring to the recent high-level Quidditch competition Harry had taken part in. After his graduation from Hogwarts, the England national team had jumped at the chance to snatch up the famed Gryffindor Seeker for their own ranks, and Harry, deciding it would be a good way to get his mind off of recent events and a way to not be sitting around a year before he found something to do, hoping a position as an Auror opened somewhere, accepted the offer. Both the Weasleys and the Grangers (the Dursleys having, since they'd decided he was perfectly of age and free of the obligation Dumbledore'd placed them under so long ago, taken their chance and kicked him out at last) had offered to take him in for the summer. But Harry'd felt he simply couldn't face the Weasleys that soon after what had happened, and Hermione... well, if there was anyone taking the loss of Ron as hard as the Weasleys and Harry, it was certainly she... and at that time Harry didn't think he could handle the grief of someone else compounded with his own. It was like what had happened after the death of Cedric Diggory, only far worse in its pain, for Harry—the guilt wasn't for merely a fallen comrade, but for the best friend of more than a third of his life.

Oh, he'd been tempted to join the others at their invitation, certainly. After all, their grief was the same, and it was often comforting to go through grief with someone who knew what you were going through... but he still hadn't, and soon the England team had gone on the road, far away from Hogwarts and Britain—sweeping its competition in nearly every game, thanks to its new addition. The Weasleys and Hermione had sent an occasional owl post, but Harry seldom allowed himself the time for more than a quick, polite response. If any.

He'd grown tired of running. And if he hadn't returned now, he might as well never have. Part of him had painfully strained against it, but not enough to still the necessity of a trip back to Hogwarts.

It was July 31 again. In the eyes of the world he was now a man, and a year ago he'd lost his best friend.

_Happy birthday, Harry Potter. _

"Really," Harry said disinterestedly, not meeting her eyes directly, but instead those of the vaguely rippling silvery Hermione that looked back from the lake. Behind him he heard the sound of an exasperated sigh, and soon came the sound of a splash and murky droplets on his glasses, the lake rippling so strongly from her stone's entry that any reflection was impossible to make out, and therefore any pondering that would distract him.

"_Hermione—" _

"At least it got your mind away from that lake," she said, thinly concealing another sigh of pained exasperation she'd used so often on Harry and Ron.

"I thought you didn't want to talk about it." He used the corner of his sleeve to wipe off his lenses.

"Either way what still happened hurts, Harry. But this way you won't face it alone."

He stuck the frames back on his face, then stared back out at the once-again flat lake surface. "Some things you ought to face alone."

"So you can sit here and drown yourself in unpleasant memories? Nice try. You may think you have to, Harry Potter, but you're the only one who ever thought you had to take the entire fate of the world on your own shoulders."

Gripping his hand firmly enough that it surprised him, she pulled him (despite his superior size) several meters back from the shore to sit at the base of the Memorial Willow, the one planted after graduation last year. It had been the last time he'd really seen Hermione, and she'd looked in decidedly worse physical shape than she appeared to be now—still recovering from the trauma to her head that had been an ironic byproduct of the act that had saved her life.

Either way, both of them had their scars from that night. Some reunion this was so far.

"How's your head?" he asked, trying not to replay the scene of its injury in his mind, and not entirely successful. The three of them—he and his friends—in the stronghold of the Dark Lord. Voldemort's focused Killing Curse, directed right at Hermione. Harry dazed and bleeding, immobile, on the floor of Voldemort's chamber, Ron diving to intercept the green flash aimed at Hermione—knocking her, unconscious against the wall, out of the flash's path—

She smiled weakly, touching part of the crown as though some pain had awakened in it. "It still hurts, from time to time... but that's usually when I'm thinking too hard," she added, putting on a wry smile.

"I really could have talked to you afterward," Hermione continued, squeezing Harry's hand affectionately, looking at him in a knowing way Harry wasn't entirely sure how to translate. He looked down in surprise at it—not because it was an unusual act for her, but because in this context it was unexpected. "No one needs to go through pain alone. He was _my_ friend too, Harry."

_And a little more _, Harry thought, though he didn't say it to Hermione, wondering _why_ the omission should bug him, even if only a little. Maybe because that even now, after he was gone, any sort of omissions on her part considering hers and Ron's relationship brought back the memory of the annoyance on Harry's part caused by more stubbornly-motivated instances like that on the part of his two friends.

During fifth year (and also in fourth, for that matter) it had become fairly obvious Ron and Hermione had begun to see each other in a far different manner than that of friends, and by the end of their sixth year they'd no longer made any attempts to hide it. Not that Harry had minded, though—relief eclipsed any reservations he may have had. But everyone had expected him to mind. After all, with Hermione went the closest female relationship he'd ever had and anyway, hadn't Harry always gotten the best of everything out of their group? They all expected he, not his sidekick, would 'get the girl.' In their eyes he was the hero, Ron the loyal sidekick, and heroes were supposed to get everything.

But Harry was happy for his friends, and he certainly didn't feel ready to make any sort of attempt at romance even if he'd felt otherwise. Besides, he thought, if his love life was anything like his other track records at Hogwarts, such an endeavor would probably have wound up fatal for him in the end. He didn't have a lot of time for, or want the trouble of, pining over some girl he barely knew and found out later wasn't everything he'd hoped. (Not a second time, anyway, he amended as the brief image of a certain Ravenclaw Seeker flitted unhappily through his brain.)

But Ron and Hermione had _finally_ seemed to overcome any obstacles—just in time for Voldemort to make his return, and in a rather big—and nasty—way.

"It's not your fault Ron died, Harry," she said quietly, and Harry flinched outwardly at the _d_-word; he still couldn't bring himself to say it in connection with his former best friend. It still didn't feel right—but then, he never expected (or even really wanted) it to. "And if anyone should feel guilty, it's me—he died stopping Voldemort from killing _me_. And I know it sounds callous, but after a year of dwelling so much on it, it's clear: it _did_ serve a purpose. If Ron hadn't intervened, you wouldn't have had the seconds you needed to strike back at Voldemort... and I'd be dead, Harry. We _all_ would have died." (After facing him the way they had, it hardly made sense to use the dogmatic You-Know-Who label any longer.)

Either way—he would have lost one of his friends that day. How different would it be, he wondered briefly, if it had been Ron who survived instead of Hermione? If _all_ of them had died? Or better—if all three of them had lived, and they could sit here now, a year later, reminiscing on the dream trio going through a heroic grand finale-to-end-all-finales to their seven years of misadventures? Surviving the tumultuous downfall of Lord Voldemort and the near-destruction of Hogwarts and remembering it (physically) unscathed over hot butterbeers at the Three Broomsticks while munching bags and bags of Every Flavor Beans? The image was so welcoming for a moment Harry was certain he was staring into the long-gone Mirror of Erised again, and closed his eyes to block the mirror-like lake from his vision.

The image remained, until he violently managed to shove it aside.

For years Harry had been known as "the boy who lived." But never, not even after learning what it had truly meant, had that title seemed so rueful until recently.

Hermione continued to look silently at Harry, her eyes conveying the unspoken invitation that had always been there, even during her romance with Ron, when such an act might have raised a 

minor, fourth-year-Rita-Skeeter-garbage-like scandal. Stubborn as he often was, he'd not really often taken notice of the offer, let alone use it (never believing he'd need it)—in all that had been going on, he certainly didn't want to be adding anything to the weight already on his friends' shoulders... never minding that they were more than willing, and more objective than he in seeing he carried far more than was healthy—and therefore bore more lingering scars, why he'd disappeared when Ron died instead of seeking comfort with others with (though he wouldn't necessarily have agreed) similar grief.

But something in her eyes for an instant made him feel the true weight of her words—about his own self-proclaimed burden, about how illogical it was for someone to carry so much on their own. And to fear letting others help you shoulder it...

She seemed to speak directly into his thoughts. "You're my friend, Harry. Debt and compensation are non-issues—have been for a long time." She exhaled once, slowly, and the flash in her expression at him was searching for a moment, for something Harry was surprised to see she'd ever be searching for. "If you'll let me."

In the end it may have been more for her sake than his, but Harry accepted the invitation at last, and rested his head on Hermione's waiting shoulder. Without hesitation she wound an arm around his back, returning the squeeze of his hand. The summer wind and the soft splashing of the lake was all that spoke at that moment, as two friends broke down the walls of one of them, opening up to a new level of friendship that hadn't been there before.

A door that had opened at a price that, had they been given another second to make the choice, they'd never had paid.

Harry looked at Hermione, and at that moment suddenly discovered a reason behind something he'd never thought about: why he'd not ever looked at her in the way Ron had. Unfailingly in seven long years, even where Ron had wavered, even when she was _with_ Ron, to Harry she'd been unconditional, unwavering, objective, caring—and completely reliable. The grounded, logical presence he was, as the hero of the group, supposed to be, who kept him and Ron down-to-earth when it was sorely tempting to escape to Cloud Nine. To see her as more would've changed that which he treasured about their connection completely, and Harry would've given himself to keep that friendship unchanged. The very awareness that he _could_ succumb to any sort of small pain or weakness, and not feel any sort of awkwardness at having her shoulder to rest on, which she equally freely offered... it was everything, and it was worth a hundred Cho Changs.

She'd been like a sister to Harry before almost anything else, and you never wondered about _things_ like _that_ with your sister—an unconscious, almost-built in instinct, which was never addressed or questioned.

But was it worth the loss they'd endured? Was there some other slap in the face that could have been used to open his eyes to this? He hated the thought of not having this renewed bond he and Hermione had, but even if he'd known about it—if there had been any way at all, he still would have rather had Ron back.

Though if this was fate's way of some sort of compensation, he had to admit this was a far better attempt than most.

She smiled at him, and it was a pretty expression for her. "I think there's something you ought to see, Harry. Feel up for a little walk?"

He was silent a moment, letting his trains of thought settle in somewhat comfortably. "Still haven't mastered Apparating, eh?"

"It's more interesting this way," she said a little too quickly, pulling Harry to his feet. He suppressed a smile; the perfectionist that still remained in his friend had little appreciation for the reminder of one major skill she'd not yet mastered. To this day he hesitated to ever bring up her failed stint in Divination. "Besides, the corridors may not be in the same place as yesterday. I don't think either of us is in the mood to splinch ourselves—"

"We're going to the castle?"

"Just follow me, Harry."

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-** HarryPotterRox365**

_A Harry Hermione Shipper_

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	2. The Mirror

Yay!! Chapter 2!

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**The Two Who Lived**

The walk was short, and the moon was still in the eastern sky (though a bit higher) when Hermione pulled Harry, still by the hand, into the familiar corridors of Hogwarts Castle, now empty due to the summer holidays.

Any number of memories passed by him unbidden—flying his old Nimbus... Malfoy being turned into a ferret... discovering he was the Heir of Gryffindor... the final group trek down the hall to the graduation ceremony, not long before everything had been shot completely to...

"It doesn't seem that long ago," Harry said quietly, as they passed a window looking out on the old Quidditch pitch and the field below it, now cast silver in the moonlight—but otherwise unchanged from his final House championship, a hard-won Gryffindor victory.

"It wasn't," Hermione said simply, then stopped at an engraving in a stone pillar in the wall, frowning. "I think it was here... let me see..."

She spent several moments with her finger roaming over the various circles and curlicues in the engraving, none of which looked remarkable to Harry, and he wondered just what Hermione was getting at with this. "Hermione—" he began—

She pressed on a circle in the wall carving, and the section of wall fell away. Hermione smiled triumphantly. "See?"

Harry stared. Though he'd had enough experience to know things were seldom all they seemed—it looked purely like an empty tunnel to him, and judging by Hermione's reaction a moment later, he'd (without thinking) apparently said so.

She shook her head and muttered something like, "like Ron... completely misses the point..." but Harry said nothing, simply allowing her to lead him down the passageway, the entry to which abruptly shut behind them. The passageway was dim but wall-mounted sconces on either side of the downwardly spiraling path seemed to light up just ahead of them as they walked, just enough for them to see just in front of them but no further.

"What on earth were you doing down here?" Harry whispered.

"You'd be amazed at some of the things that've been found in the reconstruction," she said, referring to the restoration the school had been undergoing after its razing in the final fight against Voldemort; Harry distantly noted she'd not really answered his question and filed it away for later reference. "I came here to... to see it," she went on, Harry also taking note of her odd little pause. "I was fortunate I found this before anyone else apparently had. Even during the school year, though, not much traffic is in this section."

Harry raised an eyebrow, in slight suspicion. But he said nothing.

The sconces disappeared after a few hundred meters, and the passageway seemed to get dimmer and dimmer as they walked—Harry thought momentarily to take his wand and whisper "_Lumos_," but Hermione still continued on, unheeding of the darkness, so he did as well. As it finally became dark enough he could barely see the outline of her hair in front of him, she suddenly stopped. Harry could make out a large recess in the right-side wall, and in the middle of it—

"_Alohomora_," Hermione chanted, a few tiny blue sparks coming from her wand and opening a sealed door in the recess, which swung open before them.

"I think maybe I was meant to find this now," she said, letting go of Harry's hand and walking forward into the room, as dark as the corridor itself. Harry caught a silvery glint reflected in the corner—or so he thought, for when he looked, there was nothing. "It's not logical of me, I know—but even I have to admit that... that finding this on my own, not even looking for it, is an... odd enough coincidence. Light up your wand," she directed him. Almost in unison they spoke the word "_Lumos_," the light from both their wands filling an area about four meters in a circle around them with a dim gold glow. Harry definitely saw the silver glint this time, and he turned back to the corner.

His mouth fell slightly open, his wand coming down slightly, and his feet began walking him towards the thing in the corner, the silvery glint off of it, as he neared it, seeming to become a pale ghost of a glow coming off its smooth, liquid surface.

"I'd hoped it would still be here," Hermione said from behind him. "I thought it might be good for us—for you—to see it."

Harry didn't speak for a moment, running his fingertips along the intricate gold frame, the inscription along the bottom, apparently untouched in the seven years since he'd last seen it. Never mind that at that time he had been fighting for his life against the disembodied evil that had claimed his family—this thing was so much _more_ than that.

"I heard you and Ron talk about it so much those years ago. It made me wish—wonder what I would have seen in it."

A swirl of images so jumbled it made his head hurt flashed across the mirror; he tried to sort out just one of them. The first thought that went through his mind was _it can't be_, but that was stupid, because obviously, it was there in front of him. And just like it had seven years prior, the Mirror of Erised showed Harry Potter as a young boy, not at all unlike the eleven-year-old who'd first stared into it and seen his dead family. Hermione was still beside him, but she was young too. And close beside her, just as young as Hermione and Harry—

Harry quickly turned away from the mirror, drawing in a sigh, pressing two fingers in the spot between his eyebrows. Desire must be a neat, tidy, six-letter way of saying painful-as-hell, he decided.

_What was it Dumbledore said? That human beings have a knack for wanting what's worst for them?_

Perhaps the Mirror of Erised should have been named the Mirror of... Yrekcom instead, he decided; the things you most longed for were always the things that most eluded you—and this mirror always lobbed it right back in your face, giving that desire its own face to mock you with.

Ron. His parents. Dudley in obvious discomfort on a Stairmaster. Ron. Himself after a Quidditch game, being lifted up on the shoulders of his friends, including Ron—

And there was something else too. It remained there, a faded ghost superimposed over the stronger images that flitted across the mirror... it remained there even as other ones quickly passed it by, and Harry could only barely make it out. He thought he saw himself, but something (or someone, he didn't know) else as well... he only knew for sure he wanted to see it, but no matter how he himself focused, the image refused to.

Then came Ron again, waving and smiling at him, and Harry tried to turn his gaze away, feeling as if he'd severed his optic nerves doing so.

_Voldemort killed him. He's gone forever, and Ron's blood is on __**his**__ hands. Not yours. _

He repeated the last two words to himself, but didn't seem to take much root beyond a thin surface layer.

_Not yours._

The first weeks after it had happened, Harry was certain that if he could change things, he'd have gone back and saved Ron if he could. Even if it meant dying himself.

Hell, this wasn't _right._ He could feel it, as strongly as any pain in his scar had ever been. Ron wasn't the one Voldemort had wanted. He wasn't the one that had the grudge with Voldemort. Voldemort wanted Harry dead because he was the distant descendant of a tradition that had built itself on destroying his ancestors. But Ron? He was just the friend of that descendant. (Albeit a damned good one.) Harry was supposed to be the one who got big things thrown in his path; it was what he'd done all his life... he was the one who, it seemed, was supposed to take the brunt of those things.

Even if that brunt included dying.

Even now, part of Harry was telling himself that he still wanted to go back and change things. But the mirror still didn't show anything remotely resembling that, and he felt a little disoriented knowing that one of his "safety" beliefs was discredited. But he couldn't shake the feeling that, somehow, it had been _his_ fate, his alone, to die that day. Hermione would call it Harry taking too much on himself again, and a grain of truth to that though there may be, it was far from the root cause. He'd been marked for death since infancy, and in surviving Voldemort it felt—illogically—that he'd somehow been cheated of something he'd been destined for his entire life.

(Before then, even, if the prophecies about Gryffindor's Heir defeating Slytherin's at his own sacrifice were to be believed—but somehow that had wound up only partly fulfilled. Hermione had surmised that perhaps some sort of cosmic balance overrode the original prophecy, that only one Heir was supposed to die; the fate of the wizarding world backing on whether it was to be the Light or Dark one. But what was Ron in that equation, then—nothing? Harry didn't like that.)

But some part of him had always been prepared, almost as if it had been specifically bred in him, to die against Voldemort. And that part remained unresolved, useless in him like an infected appendix.

But the image of Ron continued to smile. It refused to change to fit Harry's deep feelings of guilt, which ran so deep in places it blurred interminably with desire.

Except, it seemed, to the mirror.

In not so many words it was saying what Hermione had been saying all along.

He turned away from the mirror's line of sight fully this time, and he felt certain that some part of his eyeballs still hovered in space where they'd fought against the movement of his body and succeeded. For once Harry was grateful for his unkempt hair; it managed to block the corner of his vision from the sight of the mirror's reflection. He started to say something to Hermione, but the sight of her brought him up short.

Hermione, still staring straight into the mirror, tightened her lips at something—he resisted the urge to look, reminding himself he'd not see what she was seeing anyway. But as he watched, those same lips began to tremble slightly, and she walked forward to the mirror and knelt before it. He momentarily forgot his own vision, and watched his friend's actions. She reached out a somewhat unsteady hand to touch the silvery surface—Harry almost spoke out; he'd never seen the mirror touched, didn't know if there was something against it. But Hermione seemed to be unaffected, but for that a wall seemed to come up before her brown eyes.

The look in Hermione's eyes was very disturbing to Harry, the way she stared so fixedly at the mirror; this was not his solid, strong Hermione. He remembered what Dumbledore had told him, about those so mesmerized by what they saw in the mirror they wasted away before it...

The wall in her eyes flickered slightly and desire for a moment shone painfully clear from them, and he thought he saw her silently mouth a syllable—a name? She sat there unmoving; Harry had no idea what, if anything, he should do—

Hermione suddenly closed her eyes. "Take me away from here, Harry," she whispered, even so still making Harry want to jump. "I'm through here. Let's leave."

Harry reached out to take hold of her shoulder, but Hermione turned away and stood on her own, and he drew it away.

She looked up at him, her once-open expression suddenly unreadable—there, but still unreadable—but at least the wall had gone from her eyes. "Aren't you going to ask me what I saw?"

Seeing her reaction to whatever she'd seen, honestly, was more than enough for Harry. But maybe she _wanted_ to tell him?

"Do you _want_ me to ask?" he said quietly.

She shook her head. "Not really. And it's perfectly fine if you want to keep yours, too." Hermione sighed.

"I know why you brought me here, Hermione," he said, quietly. "But why did you look yourself? You'd seen it before."

She didn't answer.

He glanced back at the mirror, quickly enough to avoid another vision from it. "Dumbledore told me something when I came back to find the mirror one time," he paused, and Hermione nodded ever so slightly for him to continue. "He said the happiest man on earth would look into this mirror, and he'd see himself in it exactly as he was, like it was a normal mirror."

"You believe it?"

Harry quirked up a corner of his mouth. "I don't disbelieve something simply because I've never seen evidence to prove it."

She pursed her lips, running her tongue along them for a moment. "You remember those two-meter-long essays we were always required to do in History of Magic class," she said—"All too well," Harry muttered—"Well," she continued, "you know that every time we turned one in, we'd get it back, telling us what mistakes we needed to correct in the rewrite. You'd try to fix them, then you'd come back and turn it in again, hoping—"

Harry found he understood. "That when you looked again, they would be fixed."

"Gone," she murmured, looking at the mirror again; this time Harry took a single step sideways, blocking her direct view of it.

"I said I accepted what happened to Ron, Harry," she said quietly, "but I never said I'd completely gotten over it."

"You didn't find the mirror by coincidence, then—not that you or I believe in things like that," he added hastily.

She managed a wan smile. "Would you believe me if I told you a little ghost told me?"

He put a hand on her shoulder, and for just the smallest moment, her eyes were so clear he swore he saw himself in them. Her face and his, together in one image... her mirroring himself back exactly as he was...

Stifling the (very strong) urge to shake his head, he inclined his head to the door. "Come on, Hermione. Let's get out of here."

But Hermione was staring at the mirror again.

"Hermione?"

She jerked slightly, her eyes clearing once more as if she'd awoken from a trance. She glanced at the mirror, then looked at Harry, then the mirror again—her smile widened, just noticeably.

Harry moved his hand so his arm was around both shoulders, this time, and he began steering her towards the entry. As he did so, they turned back towards the mirror again—and for a flash saw something he'd never expected to see.

"_The happiest man on earth would be able to use the Mirror of Erised like a normal mirror... look into it and see himself exactly as he is. Does that help?" _

Harry thought about this. Would it show exactly what was there if exactly what the person wanted most _at that moment_ _**was**_ already there?

He thought about Ron, and the flash was gone; Hermione squeezed his hand once, and the look in her eyes was—

"You saw it, too. The moment you put your hand on my shoulder, I saw it..."

His eyes widened. He hoped she didn't mean _that_, because that would have been... well, weird, considering they'd stayed a certain way for eight years and showed no sign, no desire to be otherwise...

"Of course I love you, Harry. I wouldn't be your friend if I didn't. But I've never had fantasies about the two of us locked in a dark broom closet, if that's what you're worried about."

He was relieved enough it didn't even occur to him to be insulted. (Until sometime later.)

He blinked at the mirror. The image it showed to him was the same as it had been for Harry a minute ago. He and Hermione had stared back from the mirror... looking exactly the way they did now.

Behind them in the reflection Harry caught the vague outline of a tall, skinny human form... it was fading even as he watched, and though Harry could never confirm it he would always swear he saw the moon catch a dying, tiny glint of flaming red on it, near the top.

It should have hit him like the Hogwarts Express on full speed ahead, but perhaps because he'd been resisting it for a long enough time, it didn't.

He wanted to get over Ron's death. The mirror showed him what he'd not let himself or even Hermione tell him, at the same time showing him he already had something he wanted. As if to punctuate it she reached up and tilted his head onto her shoulder, letting him feel it for a minute. It... felt good. Nothing passionate, nothing that would embarrass either of them, just... there, and warm and steady.

He had a friend there with him. No more, no less, and the mirror showed just that.

Harry reached out and touched the mirror, and it was Hermione who finally had to gently tug him. He looked back one last time and suddenly smiled warmly, and even Hermione might not have understood why.

And somewhere in the room behind them, a tired spirit was freed.

"Stay with each other," he murmured, freezing in his mind the image of Harry's face that first time they'd met on the Hogwarts Express, and the smell of Hermione's hair against his cheek during their first kiss. "But even _think_ of those little broom closet fantasies, and I'll haunt you for eternity."

Holding the images in his mind as if in a perfect adamantine case, he walked through the mirror and away beyond the perceptions of all living things, Muggle or wizard.

**The End**

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